In a thermal power plant, for example, a computer is used for operating and monitoring the plant. Various process status values at various plant facilities are converted into electrical signals such as analog signals, digital signals, and pulse signals, and supplied to the computer.
There are other process status values necessary for the management of facilities of the thermal power plant, although they are not supplied to the computer.
The latter process status values are monitored by a maintenance engineer while making a patrol for inspecting the facilities. The inspection results are recorded on an inspection report for the management of facilities. For the purpose of such management, a regular inspection and a patrol inspection of plant facilities is also carried out.
Such conventional inspection jobs are mainly carried out manually, resulting in a very long job time.
Although inspection routes are predetermined so as to prevent the inspection of any one of plant facilities from being missed, a maintenance engineer is required to memorize all inspection routes. Usually a maintenance engineer holds in his hand an inspection sheet on which inspection routes are written so that every facility is inspected while referring to the sheet. This imposes some burden on the maintenance engineer.
A patrol inspection job for such a power plant includes: patrol inspection jobs generally regularly executed; precise inspection jobs for inspecting the plant status more precisely; and patrol inspection jobs regularly executed for recording the status of apparatuses installed for the maintenance and management of a plant. There are other inspection jobs executed irregularly in accordance with the state of a plant, such as inspection jobs executed at the start of operating a plant, and inspection jobs executed upon occurrence of an abnormal state of a plant. The number of patrol inspection courses for both types of patrol inspection jobs becomes extremely large. Furthermore, since inspection items for irregular patrol inspection jobs are determined on the basis of the object of each job, there are various combinations of inspection items. Therefore, preparing patrol inspection courses for such a variety of inspection jobs and items results in a great amount of job, time and labor.
While an inspection job is actually executed at each field after setting the inspection courses, a maintenance engineer cannot be informed of a standard value for judging if a plant status quantity for an inspection item is normal or not, or of a value obtained at the previous inspection. Therefore, it is difficult for the maintenance engineer to properly judge, for example, if the inspected plant status quantity is normal or not, or if the defect found at the previous inspection has been recovered or not.